The sections of the Doctrine and Covenants read unlike any ancient scripture because their occasions are documented to the month and often the day. A section may answer a named elder's question about his duties, direct the purchase of land in Missouri, or settle a dispute in the infant church's leadership, and the collection's theology emerges through this administrative texture.
Among the landmark sections in the Latter-day Saint edition are the revelation on the three degrees of glory in the resurrection, received in 1832 and known to early members simply as the Vision; the Word of Wisdom of 1833, counselling against wine, strong drink, tobacco and hot drinks, which later hardened into the church's dietary law; the 1836 dedicatory prayer for the Kirtland temple and the recorded visions that followed it; the instructions on baptism for the dead; and the 1843 revelation on the new and everlasting covenant of marriage, including plural marriage, publicly acknowledged after the migration to Utah.
Two later documents entered the canon as Official Declarations rather than sections: the 1890 Manifesto of Wilford Woodruff announcing the end of new plural marriages, and the 1978 declaration under Spencer W. Kimball extending priesthood and temple blessings to members of every race. The collection thus carries the movement's history inside its scripture, revision and continuation being part of the doctrine itself.